Path Analytics Shouldn’t Be This Difficult!

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Have you ever asked your web team which pages customers visit prior to making a purchase (or which actions lead to errors at checkout)? Even better, have you asked them to show you the paths from promotions in social media or other channels that lead to revenue in your brick-and-mortar locations?

Then you have probably exclaimed, “This shouldn’t be so difficult!”

Teradata has a grand, industry-leading vision of what we call Customer Journey: pulling together all the data about your customers and their journeys; analyzing that data for deep business insights; and acting on the results of those analyses or specific events to better engage with your customers. It’s a big vision, and we are already tackling it with some of our most ambitious partners.

But when I talk with many companies about this solution, I also see how a better understanding of incredibly narrow portions of this journey can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

The Path Analysis Guided Analytics Interface shows the most common paths to Bill Pay Enrollment in an online banking data set.

With the Path Analysis interface, a business user can dive incredibly deep into their most important paths by simply specifying a few parameters in drop-down menus and clicking “Show Me.” No coding. No specialized skills. Just deep insights in seconds.

Better understanding an incredibly narrow portion of the customer journey can have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Yes, as our Customer Journey story promotes, we can help you identify hundreds of events that are significant in your customers’ relationships with your brand across dozens of channels and give you the ability to respond to those events in real time.

But we can also help you understand why Mindy (or a group of customers like Mindy) didn’t click the link that you thought was so prominent on your website and instead spent 30 minutes talking to your customer support team before returning to the website to again search for answers.

And we can help you identify – visually – the handful of events across channels that most commonly precede a conversion and where there are cracks in the process.

I’ll write more about these types of use cases for path analysis and other business analytics – and the tools we use to make them business-friendly – in the coming weeks. Until then, please remember, “This doesn’t have to be so difficult.”

Ryan Garrett is senior business development manager for Teradata Field Applications. His goal is to help organizations derive value from data by making advanced analytics more accessible, repeatable and consumable. He has a decade of experience in big data at companies large and small, an MBA from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Kentucky.